At 7:00 a.m. on 29 August 1949 a plutonium bomb on a steel tower exploded on the steppe of Kazakhstan. RDS-1 ended the American atomic monopoly four years after Hiroshima, and the people who built it had been told what failure would cost.
In May 1955 the US government built a model town in the Nevada desert, with houses, shops, cars, tinned food and seventy dressed mannequins, and dropped an atomic bomb on it. Operation Cue was one of the strangest civil defence experiments of the Cold War.
On the morning of 17 March 1953, an atomic bomb destroyed a furnished American house in the Nevada desert while a television audience watched. Operation Doorstep was meant to prove that ordinary families could survive an atomic attack. It showed something else.
On 20 July 1944 Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg left a bomb in Hitler's briefing hut and flew to Berlin to launch a coup. Hitler survived, the coup collapsed within hours, and thousands were arrested in the reprisals that followed.
On the night of 27 to 28 February 1942, 120 British paratroopers dropped into occupied Normandy, took apart a German Würzburg radar and carried the pieces to the beach. The raid cost a handful of men and handed British scientists the key to jamming it.
On 10 May 1940 Germany attacked the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The Allies advanced to meet the main blow in Belgium, while the real thrust came through the Ardennes, crossed the Meuse at Sedan and reached the Channel in ten days.
On 6 June 1944 the Western Allies landed in Normandy from a fleet of nearly 7,000 vessels, after a year of planning, a major deception campaign and a one-day weather delay. By the end of the day all five beachheads were won, but at a heavy cost, and most of the day's objectives were still ahead.
In August 1943, nearly 600 bombers flew to the Baltic coast under a full moon to destroy the secret rocket centre at Peenemünde. They killed scientists and many prisoners, lost 40 aircraft, and pushed Germany's rocket programme underground.
In October 1941 two million Germans trapped half a million Soviet soldiers at Vyazma and pushed to within 30 km of the Kremlin. Mud, frost and a Siberian reserve stopped them.
On 22 June 1941, more than three million Axis troops crossed the Soviet frontier. By December a German reconnaissance unit stood 30 km from Moscow, but the war of annihilation they had begun was far from won.
Nineteen Lancasters, a bomb that bounced across the water and one night in May 1943: how 617 Squadron breached the Möhne and Eder dams, and what the raid really achieved.
A safety test, a reactor with a fatal design flaw and a night shift that never had a chance: how Chernobyl happened, how it was hidden, and what it left behind.
In February 1943, nine Norwegian saboteurs descended a frozen gorge, crept into the Vemork plant and destroyed its heavy water cells without firing a shot. Here is the full story of the raid, the escape to Sweden, and what really happened next.
